He's the guy who orgainized Disco Demolition Night at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago back in the late 1970s.
A fine qualification for media criticism, IMO
Can you honestly claim that it sounds better than something that costs less than $5000?
Probably not, if the $5K system is intelligently chosen. But I didn't make sound quality my only priority - I spent extra for build quality and expected long service life, operational convenience, and even looks.
FWIW, most of what I have was also "last years" models or used, and it came from several sources. I could get comparable sound quality for under $5K, especially if I were willing to homebrew gear, and/or modify cheaper equipment, both of which I've done in the past, and still do sometimes. However, now that I can afford it, I wanted to get something I liked listening to and that my wife didn't mind having in the living room.
But ultimately the point of a home stereo is to provide pleasure to the user. If someone says that they enjoy the sound of vinyl more than CDs, who are you or I to tell them that they shouldn't?
FWIW, I have a stereo that cost me five figures, and I only listen to CDs and FM on it.
There is absolutely NO way that vinyl sounds "better" than CDs. What ever argument you want to put forward, to human beings with our method of processing sounds, A CD with the same source of audio data will reproduce that audio data more faithfully than vinyl. Period, end of discussion. It is up to the audiophiles to disprove this statement.
Of course vinyl can sound better than CDs. "Sounds better" merely means I prefer it. Saying that there's no way vinyl sounds better than CDs is like saying that there's no way strawberry ice cream tastes better than chocolate.
What you can say is that there's no way vinyl sounds more accurate than CDs. While you could make a contrary argument (say, that the distortions in LP playback cancel out distortions in the recording process), this is a defensible statement.
But the LP vs CD argument is different than other audiophile foolishness, like $7000 cables. People who sell expensive cables claim audible differences where no one has ever proven that there is any difference, so it's not reasonable to claim a preference. No one claims that there's no audible difference between LPs and CDs, so people should be expected to prefer one over the other. And it's not reasonable to claim that everyone else should share your preference. Some folks prefer "pretty" to "realistic".
Probably the funniest was one on the HardwareCentral forum, which insisted that MP3's sound differently off different hard drives, and of course his superior ear can easily tell the difference between a Maxtor and a Seagate.
Well, it is possible that the guy could have heard a difference, because of the physical noise from the HD itself. Seagates have the reputation of being typically quieter in operation than Maxtors.
Not that that means that the audiophile's explanations for the differences he heard aren't completely ignorant. But it's not impossible that he could have identified differences in a double blind test.
Now the digital master used is almost certainly of higher quality than version pressed onto a CD...
That's the key here - the quality of the mastering. It only stands to reason that the record company won't screw up the LP master as much as the CD, since a much larger proportion of the LP buyers care about sound quality.
There are a lot of companies (Mobile Fidelity being the best known) who've made a good business out of releasing "audiophile" versions of commercial CDs. The only real differences in the "audiophile" versions are (1) better mastering and (2) double the price
And I'd like to echo the comments of a previous poster: if you are looking for high-quality cables / connectors/etc. but don't want to get ripped off, use Parts Express. They kick all kinds of ass.
Parts Express is good, but I buy most of my cables from http://www.markertek.com/ This is a pro video house, and sells cables to audio and video pros. Well made from good parts, and reasonably priced.
United's proposal will just encourage even more people to not check bags, but carry everything on. That will just increase the amount of time it takes to load their planes. But the way to minimize costs is to minimize the time your planes spend on the ground between flights - that's one of the keys to Southwest's success. So United may end up costing themselves more than they get in additional revenues, while annoying their customers even more than the do now (if that's even possible!)
At least on international flights, those orange tags are mainly for business and first class. Not that they make a big difference in when your bags come off. I fly from ORD to LHR a couple of times a year for business, and my company pays for business class. Invariably the first bags on the conveyor don't have the orange tags.
Re:It doesn't "remotely shut down vehicles"
on
Stalling Cars Via OnStar
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· Score: 2, Informative
For example, with BMW Assist, BMW's OnStat-like service, equipment is physically disabled in the car if the user does not subscribe to a service.
Are you sure about that? I just bought a new BMW about 10 days ago. Today I pressed the BMW Assist button, to see if it was working. The nice lady who answered said that I wasn't enrolled in the service, and they couldn't sign me up until I went to the dealer and signed a subscription form. This conversation took place over hardware that, if you're right, was physically disabled because I never signed the subscription form.
Back in LP days, records were often compressed to cope with the limitations of vinyl phonographs, in particular limited signal to noise ratios. You could compensate for this by getting an expander box, which would do the opposite of compression. It wasn't a perfect solution, since you had to guess how much expansion to use on an album by album basis, but it could be pretty effective. McIntosh built this kind of circuit into some of their preamps, and you could also get a stand alone box to do this. The best known brand was the dbx Compander. I'm sure you could find one of these on eBay, or if you're lucky at a garage sale or Salvation Army.
Actually, the risk of hearing loss is proportional to both volume level and the time you're exposed. Louder but very short peaks but a lower average level (ie, like natural sound) is usually less risky than a higher average level but lower peaks.
Lossy compression sounds bad on classical music, period, and the same tends to be true for similar sources like solo acoustic guitar, piano, etc. Lossy compression assumes that most of the data is unimportant, which in a dense mix tends to be true due to masking. In a thin mix, though, that assumption falls apart, and so does lossy compression.
Are you suggesting that symphonic music isn't very complex? I really don't think that is the case at all - there are more instruments playing more parts in a symphony than in pretty much any other type of music.
That's not to say that classical sounds good on an MP3, only that the theory you present can't be the whole story.
FWIW, I record all my files in flac, but that's because hard drive space is cheap, so why take the risk with a lossy format?
I'd like to see an mp3-type format encoded against 24/96 source material. Odds are that even at ~256kbps you can get better-than-CD quality if you use better-than-CD source material. Sure, the 24/96 source sounds better, but you can't actually buy that anywhere so it's a moot point.
Sure you can. Try http://www.linnrecords.com/ - they have 24/96 downloads for sale, in either flac or wma formats. You'll need to like classical, jazz or Celtic music, though.
seriously, that's the most transparent excuse in modern politics. when you are disgraced, you leave and tell the world 'its time to spend more time with my family.'
Legally, he appointed them (all the ones he fired he'd previously appointed), and so can fire them. But there are a couple of other problems here. First, the inconsistent and implausible stories they've been giving as to why they fired them show that they've obviously been trying to cover something up here. Congress has the legal right to an explanation about why people who they previously approved in their jobs were fired, and lying to Congress is a crime. (I seem to remember Republicans and the "liberal media" being really focused on this point back in the late 1990s...)
Second, and more importantly, there's now a fair amount of evidence that many of the prosecutors were fired because they wouldn't bring politically motivated indictments (ie, trumped up "voter fraud" cases against Democrats before an election), or did prosecute Republicans (ie, Duke Cunningham). Even worse, there's some evidence that other prosecutors did bring marginal vote fraud cases against Democrats for political reasons - one in Milwaukee was just thrown out by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which basically (and highly unusually) said there was no basis whatsoever for the prosecution.
This is a perversion of justice that you expect in third world dictatorships, but is pretty much unprecedented in US history. Even Nixon's crimes were not this bad. It's basically a subversion of democracy and of the US Constitution, which Shrub and his gang of thugs swore to uphold.
But then, it appears that 30% of the population believes that a blow job is a bigger threat to the republic than trying to put people in jail for supporting the Democrats.
Yes, and in the 1800s US railroads were built with massive government subsidies - the Union Pacific got a free right of way, and half the land within 10 miles of that right of way! The difference between us and the Europeans is that we stopped subsidizing the railroads, let them deteriorate, and now subsidize them just enough to not fall apart completely. The Europeans (and the Japanese) spend the money on upgrades and maintanence.
And it ain't private industry paying for the interstates, or the airports, in the US. Only rail is supposed to pay its own way.
What's the penetration of Cable TV in the US? The size and population density of the US doesn't seem to have kept cable TV away from 85% of the population. http://www.onetvworld.org/?module=displaystory&sto ry_id=1480&format=html This may still be a lower percentage than in Japan or Germany, but it's still most of the population. The folks who live in truly rural areas of the US are actually a pretty small percentage of the population.
I'd think that anywhere you can get cable, you should be able to get broadband. I suspect the primary driver here is that other countries look at broadband as a long term investment in infrastructure, while the service providers in the US look at it as a short term profit opportunity.
It's sort of weird to see American lefties coming up with weird ideas that would go totally overboard even here in notorious commie Europe. I don't think anyone here would suggest that there has to be some kind of a vague fairness criterion to fill for all speech that is transmitted in media.. that would neuter most speech that tries to say anything of value. An important quality of public discussion is the ability to take a side, so that your argument may then be countered on its merits.
That isn't what the concern is. The problem is that, while there's plenty of airtime in the US media for even the most extreme right wing viewpoints (e.g, Ann Coulter), you rarely see anyone to the left of, say, John Kerry. Even the so-called "liberal media" interviews and quotes lots more Republicans than Democrats. The whole intent here is to get more political balance into the US media. Whether a government mandate will be effective in doing so is another issue, of course.
The Dems would love to silence AM radio because it's the only source of media that isn't dominated by leftists. Funny how the right wing defines the beliefs of 2/3s of the US, and 90% of the rest of the world, as "leftist". That's been an effective technique for them over the years - define the "center" as where you want to stand.
The big media (NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NYT, etc) basically support the powers that be. 40 or 50 years ago, when liberals ran the country, there may have been some truth to claims of "left wing media bias". But conservatives have run the country since at least Reagan (arguably since Nixon), and so the media has actually had a right wing bias for many years. See, e.g., http://www.fair.org/index.php
Unless reason has been shown, any search is unreasonable.
Not really. If you leave a bag of pot on the dashboard of your car in a shopping mall parking lot, where any passer by can see it, it's not unreasonable for a cop to go look through your windshield based on a tip from the passer by. This is a search, but it's not unreasonable because you have no expectation of privacy for what you left in plain view of the public.
In the mail situation, the equivlent would be the government reading what you wrote on a post card. Since anyone who handles the post card can read it, an FBI agent doing so is not an unreasonable search. It's when they open your sealed letters, where you can reasonably expect that the post office employees won't read the contents, that they need a warrant, or a president who has no respect for American values or his fellow citizens.
I don't think what people are making fun of here are blind people. What they're making fun of is Texas lawmakers who are so extreme on "gun rights" that they're willing to legalize such an obviously dangerous and stupid idea. You don't see them letting blind people get drivers licenses, but with guns, it's OK.
I don't have a problem with what your brother did for his friend, but there are folks out there who seem to think there should be no regulations on guns, period. The only rational response to such people is to make fun of them, which they make very easy to do.
I've never worked for the gubbment, but in the corporate world I was once put in charge of my department's United Fund campaign for the year. I did this on company time using my company computer. I'd assume that the Feds do it the same way.
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He's the guy who orgainized Disco Demolition Night at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago back in the late 1970s. A fine qualification for media criticism, IMO
You can't make "champaign" except in the Champaign region of France.
No, you can't make "champaign" except near the University of Illinois. You can't make "champagne" except in the Champagne region of France.
Probably not, if the $5K system is intelligently chosen. But I didn't make sound quality my only priority - I spent extra for build quality and expected long service life, operational convenience, and even looks.
FWIW, most of what I have was also "last years" models or used, and it came from several sources. I could get comparable sound quality for under $5K, especially if I were willing to homebrew gear, and/or modify cheaper equipment, both of which I've done in the past, and still do sometimes. However, now that I can afford it, I wanted to get something I liked listening to and that my wife didn't mind having in the living room.
FWIW, I have a stereo that cost me five figures, and I only listen to CDs and FM on it.
Of course vinyl can sound better than CDs. "Sounds better" merely means I prefer it. Saying that there's no way vinyl sounds better than CDs is like saying that there's no way strawberry ice cream tastes better than chocolate.
What you can say is that there's no way vinyl sounds more accurate than CDs. While you could make a contrary argument (say, that the distortions in LP playback cancel out distortions in the recording process), this is a defensible statement.
But the LP vs CD argument is different than other audiophile foolishness, like $7000 cables. People who sell expensive cables claim audible differences where no one has ever proven that there is any difference, so it's not reasonable to claim a preference. No one claims that there's no audible difference between LPs and CDs, so people should be expected to prefer one over the other. And it's not reasonable to claim that everyone else should share your preference. Some folks prefer "pretty" to "realistic".
Well, it is possible that the guy could have heard a difference, because of the physical noise from the HD itself. Seagates have the reputation of being typically quieter in operation than Maxtors.
Not that that means that the audiophile's explanations for the differences he heard aren't completely ignorant. But it's not impossible that he could have identified differences in a double blind test.
That's the key here - the quality of the mastering. It only stands to reason that the record company won't screw up the LP master as much as the CD, since a much larger proportion of the LP buyers care about sound quality.
There are a lot of companies (Mobile Fidelity being the best known) who've made a good business out of releasing "audiophile" versions of commercial CDs. The only real differences in the "audiophile" versions are (1) better mastering and (2) double the price
Parts Express is good, but I buy most of my cables from http://www.markertek.com/ This is a pro video house, and sells cables to audio and video pros. Well made from good parts, and reasonably priced.
United's proposal will just encourage even more people to not check bags, but carry everything on. That will just increase the amount of time it takes to load their planes. But the way to minimize costs is to minimize the time your planes spend on the ground between flights - that's one of the keys to Southwest's success. So United may end up costing themselves more than they get in additional revenues, while annoying their customers even more than the do now (if that's even possible!)
At least on international flights, those orange tags are mainly for business and first class. Not that they make a big difference in when your bags come off. I fly from ORD to LHR a couple of times a year for business, and my company pays for business class. Invariably the first bags on the conveyor don't have the orange tags.
Are you sure about that? I just bought a new BMW about 10 days ago. Today I pressed the BMW Assist button, to see if it was working. The nice lady who answered said that I wasn't enrolled in the service, and they couldn't sign me up until I went to the dealer and signed a subscription form. This conversation took place over hardware that, if you're right, was physically disabled because I never signed the subscription form.
Back in LP days, records were often compressed to cope with the limitations of vinyl phonographs, in particular limited signal to noise ratios. You could compensate for this by getting an expander box, which would do the opposite of compression. It wasn't a perfect solution, since you had to guess how much expansion to use on an album by album basis, but it could be pretty effective. McIntosh built this kind of circuit into some of their preamps, and you could also get a stand alone box to do this. The best known brand was the dbx Compander. I'm sure you could find one of these on eBay, or if you're lucky at a garage sale or Salvation Army.
Actually, the risk of hearing loss is proportional to both volume level and the time you're exposed. Louder but very short peaks but a lower average level (ie, like natural sound) is usually less risky than a higher average level but lower peaks.
And don't you know what the lyrics of the "Ode to Joy" are all about? They'd make Larry Flint blush!
That's not to say that classical sounds good on an MP3, only that the theory you present can't be the whole story.
FWIW, I record all my files in flac, but that's because hard drive space is cheap, so why take the risk with a lossy format?
Legally, he appointed them (all the ones he fired he'd previously appointed), and so can fire them. But there are a couple of other problems here. First, the inconsistent and implausible stories they've been giving as to why they fired them show that they've obviously been trying to cover something up here. Congress has the legal right to an explanation about why people who they previously approved in their jobs were fired, and lying to Congress is a crime. (I seem to remember Republicans and the "liberal media" being really focused on this point back in the late 1990s...) Second, and more importantly, there's now a fair amount of evidence that many of the prosecutors were fired because they wouldn't bring politically motivated indictments (ie, trumped up "voter fraud" cases against Democrats before an election), or did prosecute Republicans (ie, Duke Cunningham). Even worse, there's some evidence that other prosecutors did bring marginal vote fraud cases against Democrats for political reasons - one in Milwaukee was just thrown out by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which basically (and highly unusually) said there was no basis whatsoever for the prosecution. This is a perversion of justice that you expect in third world dictatorships, but is pretty much unprecedented in US history. Even Nixon's crimes were not this bad. It's basically a subversion of democracy and of the US Constitution, which Shrub and his gang of thugs swore to uphold. But then, it appears that 30% of the population believes that a blow job is a bigger threat to the republic than trying to put people in jail for supporting the Democrats.
Yes, and in the 1800s US railroads were built with massive government subsidies - the Union Pacific got a free right of way, and half the land within 10 miles of that right of way! The difference between us and the Europeans is that we stopped subsidizing the railroads, let them deteriorate, and now subsidize them just enough to not fall apart completely. The Europeans (and the Japanese) spend the money on upgrades and maintanence. And it ain't private industry paying for the interstates, or the airports, in the US. Only rail is supposed to pay its own way.
I'd think that anywhere you can get cable, you should be able to get broadband. I suspect the primary driver here is that other countries look at broadband as a long term investment in infrastructure, while the service providers in the US look at it as a short term profit opportunity.
That isn't what the concern is. The problem is that, while there's plenty of airtime in the US media for even the most extreme right wing viewpoints (e.g, Ann Coulter), you rarely see anyone to the left of, say, John Kerry. Even the so-called "liberal media" interviews and quotes lots more Republicans than Democrats. The whole intent here is to get more political balance into the US media. Whether a government mandate will be effective in doing so is another issue, of course.
The big media (NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NYT, etc) basically support the powers that be. 40 or 50 years ago, when liberals ran the country, there may have been some truth to claims of "left wing media bias". But conservatives have run the country since at least Reagan (arguably since Nixon), and so the media has actually had a right wing bias for many years. See, e.g., http://www.fair.org/index.php
If you want to read real "leftist" media, try The Nation http://www.thenation.com/ or The Progressive http://www.progressive.org/
In the mail situation, the equivlent would be the government reading what you wrote on a post card. Since anyone who handles the post card can read it, an FBI agent doing so is not an unreasonable search. It's when they open your sealed letters, where you can reasonably expect that the post office employees won't read the contents, that they need a warrant, or a president who has no respect for American values or his fellow citizens.
I don't think what people are making fun of here are blind people. What they're making fun of is Texas lawmakers who are so extreme on "gun rights" that they're willing to legalize such an obviously dangerous and stupid idea. You don't see them letting blind people get drivers licenses, but with guns, it's OK. I don't have a problem with what your brother did for his friend, but there are folks out there who seem to think there should be no regulations on guns, period. The only rational response to such people is to make fun of them, which they make very easy to do.
I've never worked for the gubbment, but in the corporate world I was once put in charge of my department's United Fund campaign for the year. I did this on company time using my company computer. I'd assume that the Feds do it the same way.